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Wednesday, 16 March 2016

Don’t Be a Dick: Tips and Tricks for How to Talk About Comics

By Kim O'Connor

I’m having a hard time writing about comics. Some weasel
called me garbage and I feel sort of…paused. A shaky angry sort of pause, like
I’m on VHS. Of course I know better. I know better than to be mad, much less to
beat myself up over feeling mad. Above all, I know better than to publicly
acknowledge any of that, ever. It’s the sort of thing that makes you look dumb
online.

Remember when Shia LaBeouf did
that stunt where he watched all his own movies back to back? It was the
latest effort to rehabilitate his reputation after years’ worth of antics that included plagiarizing Daniel Clowes, chasing a homeless man, and maybe
almost murdering his girlfriend. In a world in which Britney is a
long-forgotten joke and LiLo, at 27, was described
by the New York Times as “years beyond her peak, shorthand for total public
collapse,” LaBeouf’s team wasn’t even worried. When you’re a dude, all you need
is a publicist with enough chutzpah to spin your blatant mental illness/substance
abuse problem as self-aware art. Who needs a comeback when you can just pretend
your client’s entire shitty life has been a long con in the name of something
(anything!) avant-garde?

Lauded as “performance art” by WIRED and a “work of genius”
by Rolling Stone, LaBeouf’s movie marathon got massive amounts of perfunctory press.
My favorite report was from a journalist at New York Magazine who observed part
of it in person. What made his
piece interesting was a couple of sentences that inadvertently captured
something real and true about the whole spectacle:

I got excited when I realized I had to use the
bathroom, because it meant I could leave the row and push past LaBeouf, which
would allow me to see if he was a stand-up-and-let-the-person-past-you kinda
guy or if he was more into remaining seated and swishing his legs to the side. It
was the latter!

My god, is there any metaphor for #content more perfect than going
to the bathroom and writing about it? I imagine those lines would have struck
me even if I hadn’t already disliked the person who wrote them, but it’s hard
to know for sure. Abraham Riesman, a writer who literallygenerates content by taking a piss, had been a real dick
to me on Twitter the month before.

I think this was my exact face when I had my own deep meta moment
reading Riesman’s take [on the time he was a dick to me] in another piece for
New York Magazine, this time about why he quit Twitter.

I first encountered the piece when a political writer I like had
tweeted a screenshot of this paragraph; comics being a small world, I
recognized “myself” right away:

I got into a fight on Twitter with a reviewer
from a low-end culture site who had some idiotic opinions about a cartoonist I
enjoy. The reviewer is a person of no major consequence in the critical world,
and the site is widely derided, but I still felt compelled to get into an
argument with her. I wasted nearly an hour doing so and found myself exhausted
afterward.

Riesman’s writing had once again accidently revealed something
real and true—not about the nature of Twitter, but about comics discourse,
which is badly broken.

I’m not sure how to make this point without going into excruciating
detail about what actually happened, but I promise you this is going somewhere:
The “fight” Riesman referenced was in fact a string of a dozen or so angry, condescending
comments he tweeted at me over the course of an hour. The occasion for his fury
was my review of Adrian
Tomine’s Killing and Dying, which I
dinged for having no real women characters. In that review, and on Twitter, I
linked to six or seven other reviews of the book (and issues of Optic Nerve that later became the book).
Riesman took those links to be a series of personal attacks on the authors from
a tacky, uninformed asshole [me] who clearly hadn’t read enough Tomine to
appreciate his genius.

Riesman’s mistake (a common one) was in not recognizing the
difference between a critique of someone’s work and a personal attack—a mistake
he would repeat when he personally attacked me three months later. I mean, I still
don’t think the pieces that I linked were very good (which is a comment on
specific pieces of work, not the careers or credibility of those writers). But
my point wasn’t hey, let’s have a laugh
at these ding-dongs; it was that critics tend to hit the same notes in
reviews of Killing and Dying. They
praise Tomine’s mastery, perceptiveness, emotional range and
subtlety—observations that don’t really hold up if you bother to look past his
male characters. It’s not that other critics are “wrong” to like Tomine. I just
find fault with the homogeny they collectively represent.

I politely explained all this to Riesman later that afternoon,
but he’d already quit Twitter.

That was in October. Fast-forward to late January. Riesman deleted
all his tweets to me in preparation for the publication of his piece, but I had
screenshots I’d taken just a few weeks before. As it turns out, the time he
argued @ me had stuck with me, too. Saved in a folder titled “Don’t Be a Dick,”
I had used them as inspiration for an essay about divisiveness in comics
culture that I had started writing earlier that month. (C&C went on hiatus
in January, so I never finished it.) Here’s how it began:

A few months ago, a comics dude ruined my
afternoon. I mean, it wasn’t anything serious. He didn’t lick my face at an industry
event or lead a frothing bro army into my inbox. It
was just a regular stupid boring kind of ruin, like when you’re having a nice
dinner outside and it starts to rain.

You know, the kind of ruin where you reviewed a book for free, for
“fun,” except now you’re on a work call, and you can barely hear the person
you’re talking to because your phone keeps vibrating with patronizing tweets
from a shaky red-faced fanboy who will rage quit the platform before you even
hang up. Adding insult to injury, being a shaky red-faced fanboy is what he does for a living, having defeated
the final boss of the tcj comments section and found whatever version of the
philosopher’s stone it is that lets you monetize explainers on stuff you and your red-faced brethren love to shake about. This is just one of the many
reasons why, as the angry man will helpfully explain in the months to come, he
thinks he’s so much better than you. God bless this meritocracy.

Anyway, those dumb screenshots were the only reason I was able
to call Riesman on what he had
written. Partly because of that, but mostly because he had already made himself
look so bad in his own ridiculous piece, it became a whole thing on Twitter
that day. I think on the surface it probably looks like I “won” that argument,
if you can even call it that. (It was never my argument; it was his.) But the
reasons I’ve been having a hard time writing about comics are more about the
things no one saw. That’s the way it is with comics controversies (big and
small alike)—they’re these unimpressive piles of tweets or comments or emails
or whatever, or even just the ghosts of those things. Intimations and
fragments. The more you have to sift through them, the pettier it all seems.

After Riesman was mocked in an industry newsletter (media, not
comics), my paltry Twitter following doubled overnight, and a lot of writers I
really admire started following me back. I guess that should have made me feel good
(or at least not bad)? They followed me because I stood up for myself. But I
had suddenly come to the attention of my professional heroes as a direct result
of a man calling me a low-end idiot nobody, and I guess I wish the
circumstances could have been different.

Meanwhile, someone sent me a link to an insane Facebook rant
that Riesman had written back in October. “I found myself drawn into a conflict
with a progressive comics essayist,” it began. (“Progressive comics essayist.”
Hahaha, kill me now.) He goes on:

Her willfully ignorant opinions tensed up my
stomach and I, against my better judgment, indulged my righteous fury and wrote
a half-dozen tweets pointing out the flaws in her argument (and how those flaws
ultimately do harm to the cause of progressive comics criticism). But why? Why
did I bother? This was a person with a pittance of an audience, writing for a
laughably backwater website. Why was I wasting my time? And why had I
experienced a physically harmful reaction when I read her tweets?

I know that reads like parody but the sad truth is that it’s
couched in thousands of words that are totally, totally serious. Reading that
post…I don’t know. Part of me thought it was hilarious. But also, knowing that
my opinions on Adrian Tomine made some stranger physically ill—and that he
remained so angry about it that he wrote something very similar on a public,
high-traffic platform three months later—makes
me feel deeply fucking weird. So much so that I’ve effectively quit Twitter
myself (for now, not forever). I mean, I’m there. I just feel strange.

Even as I was taking in Riesman’s [other] rant, Comics Twitter
did as Comics Twitter does. Hey, you gotta hear both sides. Spotted: the most self-obsessed
dude in comics crit with a series of subtweets about what a piece-of-shit
writer I am, and what a crying shame it was he couldn’t complain about it more
openly. He was the hero Twitter deserved, but not the one it needed just
then…not that he was going to let a little thing like popular opinion keep him
from being a bit of a goon. He was immediately retweeted by an industry
blogger who had been mad af in my DMs the week before, accusing me of libel in
an old thing I had written about racism. (Libel! Which, like, lol. But also think
about the absurd levels of hostility and defensiveness it takes to arrive at libel.) I mention all this because
they’re two more good examples of comics types who couldn’t distinguish between
a critique and a personal attack to save their lives. They’re both routinely awful
to anyone who disagrees with them.

Another thing that happened behind the scenes was that Riesman
sent me a bunch of really lousy apology emails. (I’m not going to quote them at
length, but they were frustrating. Like a telepath pushed to her limits, my
nose started to bleed when I received the fourth one.) He didn’t want to say he
was sorry on Twitter because he thought it would “fan the flames,” but I was more
than welcome to announce that I had received a private apology. I wrote a long,
thoughtful response to his second email; exactly six minutes later, he replied
that he was going to carry forth my vital words as he tried to be a better
person. Well, yay for him. Me? I still feel stuck on his anger and contempt, which
I guess I’m supposed to believe somehow transmuted into a benign state of
totally self-aware repentance in the six minutes it took for him to read and
respond to my email.

Even as he was writing me all those apologies, Riesman was
begging his editor in the background to let him change the piece. At first the
editor said no, saying it was against the magazine’s policy. When Riesman asked
a second time, his editor agreed to the change. The piece was quietly
rewritten. This is what it says about me now:

I picked a fight on Twitter with a cultural
critic. It was someone I don’t know personally and who I had noting to gain
from fighting with, but I still somehow felt compelled to start an argument. I
wasted nearly an hour doing so and found myself exhausted afterward.

And here’s the note that was appended at the bottom:

*A previous
version of this article framed the incident that led Riesman to leave Twitter
in a light that was, in retrospect, unnecessarily harsh in its characterization
of the other person involved.

The new version is somewhat more accurate in its description of
the original incident. It is, however, dishonest in framing the change as
“unnecessarily harsh” (as opposed to inaccurate or misleading), in leaving no
record of the original passage, and in continuing to refer to what happened as
a two-sided fight. The purpose of the change itself was to make Riesman look
like less of an asshole for anyone new to the article (it was still trending at
the time)—and, presumably, to make it harder for me, a person who regularly
writes about sexism and power dynamics in comics culture, to reference it later.
On the record, Riesman gets to be the reasonable person he never was, and an
act of bullying that I explicitly tried to call attention to was effectively
obscured. You can see a pattern here—being a dick and deleting the tweets,
belittling me in New York Magazine and deleting that too, sending a bunch of bad
apologies but refusing to publicly acknowledge any wrongdoing…it’s nasty,
manipulative, and self-serving. And the more words I have to use to describe it,
the more it looks like I’m just making a big deal out of nothing.

Feeling like a fucking idiot (I’m fully aware that I’m the only
person on earth who cares), I asked the editor to either restore the original passage
or write a correction that didn’t emphasize Riesman’s rehabilitation. His
reply? Sorry, no. “We considered the revision of that passage carefully.” Well,
so did I. And including the original piece, the opaque “correction,” and that
correction’s seeming disregard for New York Magazine’s actual correction policy,
I count at least three really dubious editorial calls.

Some time has passed, but an inconvenient problem remains:
comics crit is a very small world in which Riesman has a very loud voice. Sometimes
it grates. Case in point: I was researching a difficult piece, a really
personal take on Jessica Jones in which I explain why I think the show’s sexual
politics are bad. One of the first links I encountered was a piece by Riesman, “Jessica Jones Has Hot Sex and
Nuanced Sexuality,” that conveys his unbridled admiration for an episode in which
“the title character got screwed doggy-style.” If you’ve actually watched the
scene, you might recall it isn’t exactly the “wild romp” Riesman describes; for
example, Jessica flips over because she feels uncomfortable looking into her
partner’s eyes. As viewers, we don’t yet know exactly what’s up with that—it’s
the first episode—but the scene is explicitly marked as emotionally fraught. If
you couldn’t tell by her body language in the scene itself, the fact that she cries
and pukes afterward is another helpful clue.

Anyway, here’s Riesman crowing about how what a hot fuck he
thinks that was:

Smash cut to Luke on top of Jessica in his
bed, going at it with a sexual fury unlike anything Marvel (or DC, for that
matter) has even come close to putting on screen. She eggs him on, and when he
warns her that she might not be able to take it, she insists she can. At that
point, he flips her over and starts taking her from behind while the camera
focuses on her impassioned face. It's a scene where Jessica is in total control
of her sexuality. Whatever her reason may be for banging Luke, she's doing it
on her terms. It's the way real-life grown-ups have sex, not the way neutered
TV superheroes do.

Yeahhhhhh doggie!That’s exactly what
incredible sex looks like when you’re an adult who feels totally in control:
avoiding eye contact, crying in the bathroom, and projectile vomiting in the
street after fleeing the scene like a
criminal. Any sexually empowered woman can tell you that’s the trifecta.
But seriously, this is what passes as a feminist perspective at all those
“high-end” culture sites: a white guy writing about his horny level while, in the
background, he squelches the voice of an actual woman who writes on the same
subjects. Or tries to write about them, anyway. I don’t know. I’m having a hard
time.

I’m writing today because I think I know the answer to a
question that comics types revisit every so often: Why aren’t there more people
writing comics crit?

Some of the reasons are universal. (There’s no money in it.
There’s no real audience.) Others are huge, but not universal, like systemic
racism and sexism. On top of all that there’s
another, more nebulous obstacle that some of us experience, and that’s the fact
that comics promotes a culture in which people feel way too comfortable acting
like total dicks to complete strangers.

I know what some of you are thinking. Kim, I can’t help but notice that you yourself are a total dick.
No, my friend. You are mistaken. I am a bitch.

How does one know a dick from a bitch? To start, a dick is
someone with the total inability to distinguish between a personal attack and a
critique of someone’s work. A bitch is someone who’s seriously sick of that
shit.

A critique of someone’s work involves good-faith engagement with
another person’s words or ideas building towards a substantive point—something
beyond “you suck” or “that’s dumb.” A dick interprets every criticism, however carefully articulated, as “you suck and
that’s dumb.”

Good-faith engagement doesn’t necessitate the absence of snark.
Dicks are really invested in the idea that critiques of them have the sheen of
respectability, like a business suit. They often wonder why a bitch can’t be
more polite. They ask this calmly, drawing upon a seemingly endless reserve of
something they believe to be neutrality. They don’t understand they are a
protected class. See, when you’re a dick in comics culture, all the other dicks
don’t act like dicks towards you. It must be some sort of crazy coincidence.

Personal attacks, I hope we all agree, are shitty and unfair.
Conveniently for dicks, all negative assessments of their behavior or work are
classed as personal attacks. This provides two key benefits: (1) there’s no
need to take the negative assessment seriously, since it’s supposedly shitty
and unfair, and (2) it’s totally fine to respond with an honest-to-goodness
personal attack because, hey, “they started it.” And so we have this weird intractable problem in comics culture where
all the dicks are taking everything
personally, but also nothing personally,
often while doubling down on whatever behavior it was that they were being
criticized for in the first place.

Like bitches before me, I’ve been called sanctimonious and petty
and provocative. What I am, in fact, is tired of people being dicks—often to
the detriment of my own message.

(A message that is, invariably: don’t be a dick.)

It’s that signal failure that bothers me most, much more so than
whatever dumb angst that people like Riesman make me feel. That guy’s an
employee of a prominent magazine—one I subscribe to!—not the old coot who used
to leave me unsettling comments about “dishonoring” the Hooded Utilitarian. Which
is worse: if I can’t convey a simple, obvious point to the kind of “opponent”
who should be most receptive to my message? Or if misogyny is so entrenched in this
culture that I can’t review an Adrian Tomine title without some asshole making
me want to quit comics?

Riddle me this: how is it that Abhay Khosla writes a novella-length
wank joke about racism, misogyny,
etc. and gets celebrated as a balls-to-the-wall TRUTH TELLER while the rest of
us (women) writing about the same stuff get weird, aggressive, distressing bullshit,
very often from our peers? I wrote one measured comment on his (mostly great) piece
about how one section was weak and disingenuous and what *I* got was a personal
attack from another commenter that tcj had to censor. I’m sincerely grateful to
Khosla for taking the time to explain why trash opinions and literalcrimes are Very Bad to a bunch of men
who think most of that stuff is a joke anyway, but that’s an entirely different
project with different stakes than whatever it is that the rest of us who wrote
about those issues all last year have been out here trying to do, often in the
face of real hostility. No one seems inclined to discuss that hostility with
any openness or honesty, much less examine it in terms of personal
responsibility.

Here’s my suggestion: We need to call a moratorium on personal
attacks in comics crit. Really this boils down to basic human courtesy. Don’t
be a dick. Don’t be a dick to me. Don’t be a dick to anyone. Don’t attack people
personally. Make fun of the stupid things
they say, not who they are or where they said them. And maybe try to
do all of that in service of some objective that’s not just putting someone
down. That’s not practicing criticism; that’s being a sociopath.

In so many ways, I’m living my best life in terms of writing
about comics. Somehow I’ve landed here on a website that means something to me.
When I mock cartoonists, publishers, fellow critics, and other industry figures,
I try to critique their actions and words and ideas as specifically and
substantively as possible. I don’t do it to demonize them or make them feel bad
about themselves; I do it because I’m very tired of reading the same stories
about the same shit from the same perspectives. I really grapple with trying to
find a way to write about these issues in a way that’s effective and ethical
and entertaining and interesting to me, with mixed success.

In my own work and elsewhere, I feel like I watch conversations
about the stuff I care about repeatedly fail to get off the ground. I worry I’m
slowly becoming humorless about it, which I resent. Every time I vent my anger I
know I’m losing more ground with the very people I ostensibly wish to reach. I
honestly don’t know that I’m capable of writing for an audience that doesn’t
already agree with me. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to set aside my indignation
in the service of being more effective. I’m not even sure that I should.

I guess that’s what Abraham Riesman is to me more than a
personal antagonist: a symbol of that failure to communicate. Of futility. I
mean, don’t get me wrong—I think he makes the Internet a shittier place, and
that’s on him. But I look at that stuff he wrote and think: demonstrably, I’ve
failed. I’m failing.

Maybe it’s too much to hope for, this dream of mine. Still, some
crazy part of me dares to believe that, one day, my “progressive” movement will
finally take hold. The next time you’re tempted to be a dick to someone, ask
yourself: could I just not? Maybe we'll all be surprised.

This is great stuff. It actually reminded me of Khosla at times, so it was odd to see that bit at the end (though not surprising). Anyway, here's hoping this post gets the positive response it deserves!

I've never read you before, but this article really put things in perspective to me. You're exactly right, it's like there's this breed of internet dudes who cannot for the life of them talk about substantive issues or take any kind of criticism without investing their personal identity in it and lashing out when they feel threatened.

I wish there was a solution to this. I hope your dream comes true and I share it. At the very least, I believe that the comics industry will be a better place with more voices like yours in it, so I hope you don't give up, even though it's awful.

So, as someone who has never visited the site before, I would like to say that I am now going to be a rabid fan.

It's incredibly distressing to know how small the audience is inside this sphere, especially when you have conversations like this that NEED to take place. I'm sad that I was exposed to his Jessica Jones take, but in all honesty, that article should be getting attention as an example of why men need to stop trying to dictate the voice of women writers and characters. That whole piece was disturbing and indicative of how men view women sexually. Also, it shows he never read the fucking books. . .

"[C]omics promotes a culture in which people feel way too comfortable acting like total dicks to complete strangers."

Unfortunately, while the internet exacerbates this problem, it isn't new. When I was younger, the only place to find comics criticism was the Comics Journal print magazine. At first, I thought I had found my people. Yet it quickly became clear that the editors didn't understand the difference between real criticism and personal attack. And the readers, in the form of letters, egged on the blurring of this boundary. When the Comics Journal started its message board, this nasty attitude had an easy avenue for coming to the surface. Of course, these days there are plenty of avenues.